Posted this in the 300D forum and thought I would put it up here. If it helps one person, it will be worth it. Cheers! Rod

I know for the longest time, whenever I wanted to make a selection in Photoshop, I would grab the Polygonal Lasso Tool and slowly make my way around my selection and usually not be to happy with it. I thought I would share “one” way of making selections that is easy as long as they are not too complicated. You may want to print this out.

With your image open so you can see all of what you want to select (ie..25%), use the Magnetic Lasso tool and make a quick/sloppy selection around your subject. Once you have the marching ants “kind of” around it, click on your Quick Mask Mode button in the tool bar (or press Q on your keyboard), taking you into quick mask mode. You will notice that everything outside your selection will be red (unless set otherwise in preferences) and everything inside your selection will be normal. With your foreground color white and your background color black (in the tool bar), select your paint brush tool. You are now set to start painting your selection in.

When you paint in white you add to your selection (taking the red away), when you paint in black, you remove from the selection (adding red). With one hand on the mouse and the other on your keyboard use these shortcuts to paint your selection.

X – will toggle you back and forth from black to white. If you paint over part of your selection, hit the X key and paint it right back out.

[ - makes your brush size smaller.
] - makes your brush size larger.

As you are painting your selection, you will get areas that are small and some that are large, using the right size brush makes it a lot easier and faster to do this.

If you are not sure if you have the selection just right you can hold down your “ALT” key and click on the Quick Mask button in the tool bar and it will invert the red color with the actual selection making it easy to see if you missed something (toggling back and forth inverting the colors).

Don’t be afraid to enlarge your image (200-300%) so you can work on detailed areas.

To enlarge your image hold your CTRL key and tap your + (plus) key, to bring it down in size use CTRL and – (minus) key.

When you feel you are done painting your selection, click on the standard mode button just to the left of the quick mask mode to bring you out of quick mask mode (or hit your Q key) displaying your selection. If I think I will need that selection again in the future, I will save the selection. You will find that once you do this a couple of times, you will be able to make quick and detailed selections. I know there are some very talented PS people in this forum. Feel free to add to this as I hope I am not confusing you too much. Mind you, this is “one” way to make a selection in an image. Sorry this is so long, just wanted to add enough detail for people that have never done this. Hope this helps.

http://www.ardynas.com/FS/tutorial1.jpg
http://www.ardynas.com/FS/tutorial2.jpg

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Rod
http://www.pbase.com/rod_ostoski